Artist Statement

Molly Blumberg is a contemporary sculptor (b. 1990 in Boston, MA) who lives and works in Chicago, IL. Her sculptural practice explores the spaces where our human bodies collide and blend with our lived environments - when the inner seeps out and what should be contained becomes exposed. Using found objects, handmade paper, cast resin, and other mixed-media techniques, her work exists in moments of potential permeability where our bodies are not so separate from the objects and contexts of our surroundings.
Trained as a sculptor and a papermaker, her work is grounded in an extreme engagement with materiality as she attempts a reinvention of the figure. Bodies emerge from stacks of found domestic objects that are altered, adorned, and obscured through hand-processes. Skins of handmade paper swallow household items, broken chairs prolapse bodily blobs of rubber, nylon bulges, plaster seeps, pigments bleed and blend.
Many works are ambiguously bodily (simultaneously breasts, bellybuttons, anuses, ear canals), offering fleshy encounters with material that might make us blush or giggle. These sculptures - sometimes collages of pieces, sometimes autonomous beings - wrestle with figuration and fragmentation. Moments of specificity dissolve into formlessness, disrupting an understanding of a complete body and positioning the human body as a precarious and unpredictable material being. Pulling from art-historical depictions of the female body and employing feminist practices of fragmentation and reassembly, her work explores the phenomenology of a fleshy body that is a site of constant state change.